The Dilemma of Social Pattern - Core Knowledge Foundation

The Dilemma of Social Pattern

Melville J. Herskovits

Glimpses of the whirring cycle of life in Harlem leave the visitor bewildered at its
complexity. There is constantly before one the tempting invitation to compare and
contrast the life there with that of other communities one has had the opportunity of
observing. Should I not find there, if anywhere, the distinctiveness of the Negro, of which
I had heard so much? Should I not be able to discover there his ability, of which we are
so often told, to produce unique cultural traits, which might be added to the prevailing
white culture, and, as well, to note his equally well-advertised inability to grasp the
complex civilization of which he constitutes a part?

And so I went, and what I found was churches and schools, club-houses and lodge
meeting-places, the library and the newspaper offices and the Y. M. C. A. and busy 135th
Street and the hospitals and the social service agencies. I met persons who were lawyers
and doctors and editors and writers, who were chauffeurs and peddlers and longshoremen
and real estate brokers and capitalists, teachers and nurses and students and waiters and
cooks. And all Negroes. Cabarets and theaters, drugstores and restaurants just like those
everywhere else. And finally, after a time, it occurred to me that what I was seeing was a
community just like any other American community. The same pattern, only a different
shade!

Where, then, is the "peculiar" community of which I had heard so much ? Is the cultural
genius of the Negro, which is supposed to have produced jazz and the spiritual, the West
African wood-carving and Bantu legalism, non-existent in this country, after all? To what
extent, if any, has this genius developed a culture peculiar to it in America? I did not find
it in the great teeming center of Negro life in Harlem, where, if anywhere, it should be
found. May it not then be true that the Negro has become acculturated to the prevailing
white culture and has developed the patterns of culture typical of American life?

Let us first view the matter historically. In the days after the liberation of the Negroes
from slavery, what was more natural than that they should strive to maintain, as nearly as
possible, the standards set up by those whom they had been taught to look up to as
arbiters--the white group? And we see, on their part, a strong conscious effort to do just
this. They went into business and tried to make money as their white fellows did They
already had adopted the white forms of religious faith and practice, and now they began
to borrow lodges and other types of organization. Schools sprang up in which they might
learn, not the language and technique of their African ancestors, but that of this country,
where they lived. The "respected" members of the community were those who lived
upright lives such as the "respected" whites lived: they paid their debts, they walked in
the paths of sexual morality according to the general pattern of the prevailing Puritanical
culture, and they went to church as was right and proper in every American town. The
matter went so far that they attempted to alter their hair to conform to the general style,

and the fortunes made by those who sold hair-straightening devices and medicines are a
matter of record.

In Harlem we have today, essentially, a typical American community. You may look at
the Negroes on the street. As to dress and deportment, do you find any vast difference
between them and the whites among whom they carry on their lives? Notice them as they
go about their work--they do almost all of the things the whites do, and in much the same
way. The popular newspapers in Harlem are not the Negro papers--there is even no
Negro daily-- but the city newspapers which everyone reads. And there is the same
gossipy reason why the Harlemites read their own weeklies as that which causes the
inhabitants of Chelsea, of the Bronx, of Putnam, Connecticut, or of West Liberty, Ohio,
to read theirs. When we come to the student groups in Harlem, we find that the same
process occurs--the general culture-pattern has taken them horse, foot and artillery. Do
the whites organize Greek-letter fraternities and sororities in colleges, with pearl-studded
pins and "houses" ? You will find a number of Negro fraternities and sororities with just
the same kind of insignia and "houses." Negro community centers are attached to the
more prosperous churches just as the same sort of institutions are connected with white
churches. And they do the same sort of things there as you can see swimming and
gymnasium classes and sewing classes and nutrition talks and open forums and all the
rest of it that we all know so well.

When I visit the Business Men's Association, the difference between this gathering and
that of my own Rotary Club is imperceptible. And on the other end of the economic scale
that equally applies to Negro and white, and which prevails all over the country, we find
the Socialist and labor groups. True, once in a while an element peculiarly Negro does
manifest itself; thus I remember vividly the bitter complaints of one group of motion
picture operators at the prejudices which prevent them from enjoying the benefits of the
white union. And, of course, you will meet with this sort of thing whenever the stream of
Negro life conflicts with the more general pattern of the "color line." But even here I
noticed that the form of the organization of these men was that assumed by their white
fellow-workers, and similarly when I attended a Socialist street-meeting in Harlem, I
found that the general economic motif comes in for much more attention than the
problems which are of interest to the Negro per se.

Perhaps the most striking example of complete acceptance of the general pattern is in the
field of sex relations. I shall never forget the storm of indignation which I aroused among
a group of Negro men and women with whom I chanced to be talking on one occasion,
when, a propos of the question of the treatment of the Negro woman in literature, I
inadvertently remarked that even if the sexual looseness generally attributed to her were
true, it was nothing of which to be essentially ashamed, since such a refusal to accept the
Puritanical modes of procedure generally considered right and proper might contribute a
welcome leaven to the conventionality of current sex mores. The reaction, prompt and
violent, was such as to show with tremendous clarity the complete acculturation of these
men and women to the accepted standards of sex behavior. There was not even a shade of
doubt but that sexual rigidity is the ultimate ideal of relations between men and women,

and certainly there was no more indication of a leaning toward the customs to be found in
ancestral Africa than would be found among a group of whites.

Or, let us consider the position of the Negro intellectuals, the writers and artists. The
proudest boast of the modern young Negro writer is that he writes of humans, not of
Negroes. His literary ideals are not the African folk-tale and conundrum, but the vivid
expressionistic style of the day--he seeks to be a writer, not a Negro writer. It was this
point, indeed, which was especially stressed at a dinner recently given in New York City
for a group of young Negro writers on the occasion of the publication of a novel by one
of their number. Member after member of the group stated this position as his own--not
Negro as such, but human--another striking example of the process of acculturation.

The problem then may be presented with greater clarity. Does not the Negro have a mode
of life that is essentially similar to that of the general community of which he is a part?
Or can it be maintained that he possesses a distinctive, inborn cultural genius which
manifests itself even in America? To answer this, we must answer an even more basic
question: what is cultural genius? For the Negro came to America endowed, as all people
are endowed, with a culture, which had been developed by him through long ages in
Africa. Was it innate? Or has it been sloughed off, forgotten, in the generations since he
was brought into our culture?

To understand the problem with which we are presented, it may be well to consider what
this thing, culture, is, and the extent to which we can say that it falls into patterns. By the
word culture, I do not mean the refinements of our particular civilization which the word
has come to connote, but simply those elements of the environment which are the
handiwork of man himself. Thus, among ourselves, we might consider a spinning
machine, or the democratic theory of society, or a fork, or the alphabet as much a cultural
fact as a symphonic tone-poem, a novel, or an oil painting.

We may best come to an understanding of culture through a consideration of some of the
phases of primitive life, where the forces at work are not overshadowed by the great
imponderable fact of dense masses of population. As we look over the world, we see that
there is no group of men however simply they may live their lives, without the thing we
call culture. And, what is more important, the culture they possess as the result of their
own historical background is an adult affair, developed through long centuries of trial and
error, and something constantly changing. Man, it has been said, is a culture-building
animal. And he is nowhere without the particular culture which his group have built. It is
true that the kinds of culture which he builds are bewilderingly different--to compare the
civilization of the Eskimo, the Australian, the Chinese, the African, and of ourselves
leaves the student with a keener sense of their differences, both as to form and
complexity, rather than with any feeling of resemblances among them. But one thing they
do have in common: the cultures, when viewed from the outside, are stable. In their main
elements they go along much as they always have gone, unless some great historical
accident (like the discovery of the steam engine in our culture or the intrusion of the
Western culture on that of the Japanese or the transplanting of Negro slaves from Africa
to America) occurs to upset the trend and to direct the development of the culture along

new paths. To the persons within the cultures, however, they seem even more than just
stable. They seem fixed, rigid, all-enduring, indeed, they are so taken for granted that,
until comparatively recent times, they were never studied at all.

But what is it that makes cultures different? There are those, of course, who will maintain
that it is the racial factor. They will say that the bewildering differences between the
cultures of the Englishman, the Chinaman, the Bantu and the Maya, for example, are the
result of differences in innate racial endowment, and that every race has evolved a culture
peculiarly fitted to it. All this sounds very convincing until one tries to define the term
"race." Certain anthropologists are trying, even now, to discover criteria which will
scientifically define the term "Negro." One of the most distinguished of these, Professor
T. Wingate Todd, has been working steadily for some years in the attempt and the net
results are certain hypotheses which he himself calls tentative. The efforts of numerous
psychological testers to establish racial norms for intelligence are vitiated by the two
facts that first, as many of them will admit, it is doubtful just what it is they are testing,
and, in the second place, that races are mixed. This is particularly true in the case of the
Negroes; in New York City, less than 2 per cent of the group from whom I obtained
genealogical material claimed pure Negro ancestry, and while this percentage is
undoubtedly low, the fact remains that the vast majority of Negroes in America are of
mixed ancestry.

If ability to successfully live in one culture were restricted to persons of one race, how
could we account for the fact that we see persons of the most diverse races living
together, for example, in this country, quite as though they were naturally endowed with
the ability to meet the problems of living here, while again we witness an entire alien
people adopting our civilization, to use the Japanese again for illustration?

Our civilization is what it is because of certain historic events which occurred in the
course of its development. So we can also say for the civilization of the African, of the
Eskimo, of the Australian. And the people who lived in these civilizations like ourselves,
view the things they do--as a result of living in them-- not as inbred, but as inborn. To the
Negro in Africa, it would be incomprehensible for a man to work at a machine all day for
a few bits of paper to be given him at the end of his work-day, and in the same way, the
white traveler stigmatizes the African as lazy because he will not see the necessity for
entering on a grueling forced march so as to reach a certain point in a given time. And
when we turn to our civilization, we find that it has many culture-patterns, as we may
term these methods of behavior. They are ingrained in us through long habituation, and
their violation evokes a strong emotional response in us, no matter what our racial
background. Thus for a person to eat with a knife in place of a fork, or to go about the
streets hatless, or for a woman to wear short dresses when long ones are in fashion, are all
violations of the patterns we have been brought up to feel right and proper, and we react
violently to them. More serious, for a young man not to "settle down" and make as much
money as he can is regarded as bordering on the immoral, while, in the régime of sex, the
rigid patterns have been remarked upon, as has been the unmitigated condemnation
which the breaking of these taboos calls forth. The examples which I have given above of
the reaction of the Negro to the general cultural patterns of this country might be

multiplied to include almost as many social facts as are observable, and yet, wherever we
might go, we would find the Negro reacting to the same situations in much the same
fashion as his white brother.

What, then, is the particular Negro genius for culture? Is there such a thing? Can he
contribute something of his vivid, and yet at the same time softly gracious personality to
the general culture in which he lives? What there is today in Harlem distinct from the
white culture which surrounds it, is, as far as I am able to see, merely a remnant from the
peasant days in the South. Of the African culture, not a trace. Even the spirituals are an
expression of the emotion of the Negro playing through the typical religious pattern of
white America. But from that emotional quality in the Negro, which is to be sensed rather
than measured, comes the feeling that, though strongly acculturated to the prevalent
pattern of behavior, the Negroes may, at the same time, influence it somewhat eventually
through the appeal of that quality.

THAT they have absorbed the culture of America is too obvious, almost, to be
mentioned. They have absorbed it as all great racial and social groups in this country
have absorbed it. And they face much the same problems as these groups face. The social
ostracism to which they are subjected is only different in extent from that to which the
Jew is subjected. The fierce reaction of race-pride is quite the same in both groups. But,
whether in Negro or in Jew, the protest avails nothing, apparently. All racial and social
elements in our population who live here long enough become acculturated,
Americanized in the truest sense of the word, eventually. They learn our culture and react
according to its patterns, against which all the protestations of the possession of, or of hot
desire for, a peculiar culture mean nothing.

As we turn to Harlem we see its social and economic and political makeup a part of the
larger whole of the city--separate from it, it is true, but still essentially not different from
any other American community in which the modes of life and of action are determined
by the great dicta of "what is done." In other words, it represents, as do all American
communities which it resembles, a case of complete acculturation. And so, I return again
to my reaction on first seeing this center of Negro activity, as the complete description of
it: "Why, it's the same pattern, only a different shade!"